Re: Lua Ecosystem

[Craig Barnes <craigbarnes85@...>]

Has anyone toyed with the idea of something like Go's "go get" tool[1]
for Lua? The benefits of that system seem to be many; it's
decentralized, enforces unique namespaces (in a way that doesn't
require top-down management), makes separate package metadata mostly
redundant etc. The fact that it's decentralized would also overcome
the scalability hurdle of manually submitting new/updated rocks to a
mailing list.

I don't buy into the notion that long namespaces are somehow ugly,
since module tables are usually bound to a (hopefully shorter) local
name anyway. URI-based namespaces also allow changing something like:

    -- unmaintained / incomplete module:
    local discount = require "com.github.asb.lua-discount"

to:

    local discount = require "com.github.craigbarnes.lua-discount"

To do that in luarocks, you'd either have to come to an agreement to
replace the old module, or give it a silly name like "lua-discount-2".

[1]: http://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Download_and_install_packages_and_dependencies